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拍品专文
Santomaso's Lettere a Palladio are an inspired group of pictorial texts that the artist excuted between 1977 and 1978. Lettera a Palladio no. 2 is one of the most intense and pure canvases from this celebrated imaginary 'correspondance' with the foremost Italian architect of the Cinquecento.
This series represents the culmination of a tenacious research for a more 'classical' artistic gesture, which entailed the overcoming of his previously direct, violent, fervently subjective painting, in favour of distilled harmonies and essential forms. As F. Licht has commmented: 'The insights gained by Santomaso in his uncompromising questioning of Palladio corroborated his earlier intuition and gave him the courage to intensify his quest for an art that went beyond the limitations of Action Painting. Just as another great Venetian, Canova, had carefully obliterated all signs of personal emotion from his finished marbles, so Santomaso was no longer satisfied with the temporal and personal limitations of gestural art that threatened to become narcissistic. He had already perfected a novel technique for sifting his pigments to canvas or paper that canceled all traces of calligraphy or of expressive, dynamic brushwork. By this technical invention derived from the aquatint process, all the ephemeral interventions of the artist as a physical agent were banished in favour of a suprapersonal form of expression. By sifting pigment onto the surface and allowing it to sink into the moistened surface, the colours took on an unheard level of autonomy. No idiosyncratic calligraphy, no handling of the paint-substance is visible... The suggestion of the artist's manual exertion has been utterly overcome' (Giuseppe Santomaso, Lettere a Palladio, exh. cat., Venice, 1992, p. 19).
If Palladio represents a paradigm of the classical norm, leading the path towards a purification of the artistic syntax, he is also the interlocutor of an intimate, daily conversation, that Santomaso cultivated in years of passionate artistic experimentation. As he told to Marisa Volpi Orlandini in an interview of 1981, Santomaso was 'deeply moved by the sweeping view from the Zattere articulated by three of Palladio's churches: San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle and the Redentore' [exh. cat., Santomaso, Trieste, 1981, p. 22, quoted by F. Licht, ibid., p. 17] . The Lettere a Palladio are, in this sense, Santomaso's way of proclaming his unmistakable belonging to the noblest tradition of Venetian art.
This series represents the culmination of a tenacious research for a more 'classical' artistic gesture, which entailed the overcoming of his previously direct, violent, fervently subjective painting, in favour of distilled harmonies and essential forms. As F. Licht has commmented: 'The insights gained by Santomaso in his uncompromising questioning of Palladio corroborated his earlier intuition and gave him the courage to intensify his quest for an art that went beyond the limitations of Action Painting. Just as another great Venetian, Canova, had carefully obliterated all signs of personal emotion from his finished marbles, so Santomaso was no longer satisfied with the temporal and personal limitations of gestural art that threatened to become narcissistic. He had already perfected a novel technique for sifting his pigments to canvas or paper that canceled all traces of calligraphy or of expressive, dynamic brushwork. By this technical invention derived from the aquatint process, all the ephemeral interventions of the artist as a physical agent were banished in favour of a suprapersonal form of expression. By sifting pigment onto the surface and allowing it to sink into the moistened surface, the colours took on an unheard level of autonomy. No idiosyncratic calligraphy, no handling of the paint-substance is visible... The suggestion of the artist's manual exertion has been utterly overcome' (Giuseppe Santomaso, Lettere a Palladio, exh. cat., Venice, 1992, p. 19).
If Palladio represents a paradigm of the classical norm, leading the path towards a purification of the artistic syntax, he is also the interlocutor of an intimate, daily conversation, that Santomaso cultivated in years of passionate artistic experimentation. As he told to Marisa Volpi Orlandini in an interview of 1981, Santomaso was 'deeply moved by the sweeping view from the Zattere articulated by three of Palladio's churches: San Giorgio Maggiore, the Zitelle and the Redentore' [exh. cat., Santomaso, Trieste, 1981, p. 22, quoted by F. Licht, ibid., p. 17] . The Lettere a Palladio are, in this sense, Santomaso's way of proclaming his unmistakable belonging to the noblest tradition of Venetian art.